So I'm not doing NaBloPoMo, obviously, because I can't guarantee getting enough time free to shower every day, let alone blog every day. However in the spirit of trying to make it a month of writing, I started a NEW BLOG (because hey! I don't have enough half-finished projects!) which now has enough posts that I can just about bear to link to it.

The new blog is here and (as those of you who watch my flickr stream -- weirdos! -- will probably already have figured out) it's about PINK and BLUE or rather how everything is stupidly gender-stereotypically colour-coordinated (plus more general mockery of gender-stereotyping in toys, gifts etc). I don't promise to update it all that regularly, though depressingly there's enough material that I could probably update it a hundred times a day & not run out.

... So, yeah. Blog. Not much to shout about but there you go.

In other news, daughter is slightly bigger and I am slightly tireder. (If I don't manage to post anything else for the next decade or so, this summary will probably stay reasonably accurate!)

Love the blog. Those things are SO annoying. Well done for finding the time to highlight them.

(Keep failing to respond to messages, sorry. Would LOVE to see you! Lunchtimes, Tues or Fri evenings, and some weekends in Dec and most in Jan and thereafter are possible. Obviously want meeting to be as low-stress for you as possible.)

I felt really cross when a new toy shop opened up on my way to work - there were various sections including a "Girls toys" (sic) and "Boys toys" (sic too) in, obviously, pink and blue respectively. When I went in to see what it was like, I was pleasantly surprised to see that a lot of the same toys were in both sections, so they're obviously there for lazy shoppers. But still. Pink and blue.

My niece and nephew have been entirely pink/blue colour coded (in the societally orthodox manner). Their bedrooms are painted in those colours, they're dressed to match. My niece will say her favourite colour is pink (I didn't ask the same of my nephew). He plays with diggers, toy cars and so on, she colours in pictures of the Disney Princesses.

It's incredibly annoying.

It's far too ingrained to be able to directly contradict, but I feel I need to do what little I can to counter it; for example when I had a choice of a plastic easel in pink or a selection of primary colours, my niece got the latter as a gift.

Any suggestions for further subversion of this are welcome; but need to account for the facts that it's the parents expectation, and the children have been entirely trained to think that way. Just giving my nephew a doll's house, or my niece a train set are unlikely to get very far.

(A suggestion that it's none of my business how my brother raises his kids is probably also appropriate.)

Arrrgle. That must be hard. Yeah - undermine it however you can get it under the radar. I think the thing that aunts and uncles are best for is to show up for the 'you need a village to raise a child' and nurture any vocations if they need back up - say the lad suddenly wants to be a ballet-dance, or the lass wants to be a scientist, you can be the one that backs them up and buys them the stuff they actually want for that interest. You can help validate their choices in life if they find themselves being invalidated by their parents - and that goes for anything not just this issue.

[…]it would be of great convenience if some fashion were adopted enabling you to tell a boy from a girl.

At present it is most awkward. Neither hair, dress, nor conversation affords the slightest clew, and you are left to guess. By some mysterious law of nature you invariably guess wrong, and are thereupon regarded by all the relatives and friends as a mixture of fool and knave, the enormity of alluding to a male babe as "she" being only equaled by the atrocity of referring to a female infant as "he". Whichever sex the particular child in question happens not to belong to is considered as beneath contempt, and any mention of it is taken as a personal insult to the family.